EKT takes part in “Museums, Skills and New Perspectives in the digital era" info day

With its presentation entitled ‘Management and promotion of Greek cultural heritage public digital space: EKT proposes solutions using cutting-edge technologies’, EKT took part in the interesting "Museums, Skills and New Perspectives in the digital era" info day which was organised by the Hellenic Open University and the research group DAISSy (Dynamic Ambient Intelligent Social Systems) in Patras on 6th November 2017. Elena Lagoudi, Museologist and Harris Georgiadis, Software Engineer, presented EKT’s Repository services and SearchCulture.gr, both of which captured the attention of attendees.

E.Lagoudi talked about EKT’s repository service which is provided online and meets the needs of organisations with reputable content that want to distribute and promote their digital collections. The online service is provided in accordance with the requirements and needs of each institution, using cutting-edge technologies (SaaS: Software as a Service and Cloud Computing). E.Lagoudi explained that, ‘so far, 22 organisations have used the service, 25 repositories have been created and 4 new repositories are under development, with 100,000 documents’.

Continuing their presentation, H.Georgiadis described SearchCulture.gr, ‘It’s a digital content accumulator and an open online portal which offers centralised access to and single search of the country’s digital cultural content produced by 43 reputable organisations and now containing 55 collections with 161,881 documents.It is a modern and efficient search engine which supports hierarchical navigation of content types and historical periods, makes content in the form of Open Linked Data available and is a key supplier of the European digital library Europeana, contributing, in this way, to searchability reuse and the international projection of the country’s cultural heritage.’

The goal of the info day was two-fold: to present the European project Mu.SA – Museum Sector Alliance –the co-ordinators of which are the Hellenic Open University and the DAISSy research group as well as its first results.

The Mu.SA project
The Mu.SA project aims to address the lack of digital and ‘transferable’ skills in the museum sector, such as those identified by the eCult Skills project, funded by the European Lifelong Learning Programme (2013-2015).

Emerging roles and workflows in museums require knowledge and skills which ordinary education does not seem to provide. The project will implement a modular curriculum and a repository of digital open learning resources which will support the acquisition of more than 40 digital and transversal skills. Training will be realised through the electronic platform MOOC which will support the exchange of knowledge, experiences and best practices. Communities of practice will be created from museum professionals, students and graduates of departments connected with culture, scientists and researchers in cultural heritage and unemployed museologists who are seeking employment in the museum sector or simply want to update their training with new skills.

12 partners from 4 countries are collaborating on the Mu.SA project. Co-ordinator of the project is the Hellenic Open University with Associate Professor Achilles Kameas as the project leader. The other two Greek participants are the AKMI Vocational Training Institute and the Greek branch of the International Committee of Mueseums (ICOM).